From: Dave Winer (dave@userland.com)
Date: Tue May 08 2001 - 00:20:00 PDT
I pay Apple no money, and I don't plan to.
The bridge is betw Mac software and Unix software.
I'm specifically interested in the bridge betw scripting cultures.
It's there, and it's interesting.
Imagine calling a Mac program from the command line.
And being able to invoke a shell script from inside a Mac program.
Also there are lots of SOAP and XML-RPC implementations in the works for Mac
OS X.
It *is* an interesting place, if only for the reason that one OS can run
(modified) Mac apps, and Unix ones.
It may only be of historic interest, or it might be the beginning of
something new.
Believe me, I've been in a similar place, re being locked-in by Apple.
But now I'm not in the trunk anymore.
I got out. ;->
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eirikur Hallgrimsson" <eh@mad.scientist.com>
To: <FoRK@xent.com>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 11:50 PM
Subject: Re: It's IBM dummy
> On Tuesday 08 May 2001 01:56, Dave Winer wrote:
> > Think about Mac OS X a bit. The religious issues fall aside, and think
about
> > bridges between the two worlds.
>
> I do think about Mac OS X, a lot. More than I want to. And I really fail
to
> see a connection.
>
> The Darwin base is ~= BSD, available elsewhere for free. Available as
Darwin
> for free, too.
>
> The Apple proprietary layers (Aqua, Carbon, etc) are the same proprietary
> model that Apple and Microsoft have always used as differentiation and as
> lock-in. I expect that they are up to the usual standards of Apple
quality
> (generally quite good) and have the same probability of being dropped
> immediately upon my adoption of them (very good indeed) as previous new
> proprietary interfaces from Apple have had.
>
> You can't run a portable GUI application on Mac OS X as it is shipped.
You
> can't run a command line app, because the command line isn't enabled by
> default. Dave, I don't think it's a bridge until it runs Free Software.
> Maybe I could see it as a bridge for sufficiently motivated programmers,
but
> it certainly is not a bridge for users. End users are going to be very
> skitish about downloading a whole additional graphics interface (X) and
it's
> housekeeping. Apple could have taken care of it for them. Instead, they
> have spent a lot of money on additional proprietary APIs.
>
> My conclusion: Apple wants you to be a registered developer and pay them
for
> the privilege of investing your time in their unique APIs. They must want
> this significantly more than they want users to be able to run any class
of
> free program.
>
> Typing on PowerPC,
>
> Eirikur
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